On the eve of a new exhibition at Tate Britain devoted to the art of Augustus John and his sister Gwen, this week’s picture is one of the most assured portraits of Augustus John’s early career: a swaggeringly theatrical depiction of his slightly older friend and fellow painter, William Nicholson. John painted it in 1909, when he was in his early thirties. The work is owned by the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, to which, after the exhibition at Tate Britain is over, it will return.

 

Augustus John always nurtured the ambition to paint on a grand scale, the scale of the great Renaissance masters of the past, or of ambitious nineteenth and twentiueth-century painters such as Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Matisse and Picasso. “When one thinks of painting on great expanses of wall,” he said in 1939, “painting of other kinds hardly seems worth doing.” But despite his precocious abilities as a draughtsman John suffered from a fatal lack of imagination and was in any case virtually incapable of working on a large scale, because the challenge of organising many figures into coherent and convincing compositions proved beyond him. So almost all his best work, like the picture reproduced here, falls into the category of “other kinds of painting”. The portrait’s effect derives in large measure from the witty simplicity of its composition, designed on a diagonal running from bottom left to top right corner of the canvas. Above an imaginary line drawn across the picture between those coordinates there is only an expanse of curtain, a slice of jauntily crossed and nattily betrousered leg and an elegantly gloved hand. The principal energies of the portrait are concentrated below, focussed in the haughty, quizzical and intriguing expression which John has caught – or contrived to place – on his...

To read the full article please either login or register .